An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.
What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.
Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.
As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.
Another contradiction by a member of the economics profession. It seems to me they care very much. By linking the prize to Alfred Nobel’s name (and to the Nobel institutions), the Riksbank ensured the prize would immediately carry great symbolic prestige. The Nobel brand was already well established internationally, so adopting the name helped the economics prize gain recognition, gravitas, and legitimacy.
I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.
I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “care” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.
Since you stand by your statement so strongly, you should have it already, correct?
My point was speak for yourself, the history does not suggest you are correct. Evidence economists do care[1][2][3]. Economics was still a relatively newer niche discipline[4].
You care so little you spent time to claim you don't care twice in a row.
> I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.
I don't have an estimate for that, but we have an estimate on how much money the Sverige Riskbank bankers were ready to spend in that effort. Maybe it didn't pan out but some people definitely had a multimillion dollar interest in making that happen. As an economist you must wonder what their incentives could have been …
> You care so little you spent time to claim you don't care twice in a row.
I've seen this style of argument before and I think it's a non sequitur and total BS. The fact that he may care about feeling his opinion is being misrepresented is totally different from what his original "we don't care" statement referred to.
Are you sure though? I don’t have an opinion on this specific case, but I have been in situations where someone claims to have no interest at all in a topic and then doesn’t stop talking about it.
Excuse me? Quant finance doesn't claim to be devising grand theories about how the world operates (is more akin to engineering). And when it does, any delineation from economics is moot.
What's quintessential quant finance? Black-Scholes and no-arbitrage pricing. Don't you agree it's much more of a tool than a theory of how the world works.
> What's quintessential quant finance? Black-Scholes and no-arbitrage pricing
This is a bad model to pick to exemplify physics envy given it’s based on thermodynamic dispersion.
The term “physics envy” broadly applies to all social sciences lacking a mathematical basis. It’s a criticism of using math where it doesn’t belong. That hasn’t really fit (until very recently) with economics. It’s been a classic complaint about quantitative finance’s loftier visions of universality.
Agreed! I am a big fan of Robert Allen's books on the industrial revolution as a counterpoint to Mokyr. (The two are of course are friends with each other as well).
Mokyr’s northwestern website has links to a lot of his papers.
An extremely crude selection rule:
Anything published in the American economic review, quarterly journal of economics, journal of political economy has the profession’s “highest stamp of approval”. It’s really hard to publish anything there. (There are two journals im not listing in that “top” category but he has no papers there on his website.). On aghion or howitts websites, look for the above journals but also econometrica and the review of economic studies. Those are the “top five” in the field.
There are surely papers in good history and Econ history journals on mokyr’s website but I don’t know the journals!
Standards for any chapter in a “handbook of X economics” or “handbook of the economics of X” are high - those should be good surveys.
Similarly a paper in the “annual review of economics”
Also mokyr has a bunch of work on Amazon. “The lever of riches” is a classic. “A culture of growth” is well regarded.
Finally he has a forthcoming book called “two paths to prosperity” with two other distinguished guys - one Econ historian (greif) and one political economy guy (tabellini). It’s coming out in about three weeks. Good timing, Princeton U Press!
Aghion and howitt have a growth textbook at the advanced undergrad level called “the economics of growth.”
They have a much more advanced work called “endogenous growth theory” which is for specialists (or at least anyone with first year PhD macro)
Aghion has a book called “the power of creative destruction.”
if you run into anyone who is serious about the "fake Nobel" complaint, just ask them why they have such a high opinion of taking money from an arms dealer, and such a low opinion of taking money from a public institution in one of the Nordic welfare states.
I'm not familiar with the two others but Aghion really isn't a surprise given the track record the Nobel committee for the econ prize has of following hype rather than anything else.
(I've been very critical of Aghion's work for the past few years since I've been exposed to his work over that period, but it always appeared to me as a potential laureate given the resonance of his work)
That's a tiny article, but it does contain an interesting passage: "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" which is the core of the reason the prize was awarded. I find it interesting to see technological progress so tightly coupled to sustained growth and I wonder if the implication is that growth will stop when technological progress stagnates. Is there any proof to that effect?
There is two contributors to growth: increase in population, and productivity gains. If tech adoption slows down and population slows down, we go back to the historical norm of no economic growth.
Productivity gains don't only come from technological progress. Accumulation of capital, such as infrastructure, education, access to healthcare etc, also increase productivity.
Claiming "access to healthcare" is capital is a novel idea. It's a social infrastructure. It doesn't directly lead to production, any more than lunch breaks do.
Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
If you view the humans actually producing stuff as human capital, which many economists have done, then keeping that (human) capital in decent enough form by allowing it to have access to decent enough healthcare is a logical step forward.
We could then go a step or two forward and posit that a sick populace means a sick consumer class means reduced demand for goods that generate growth, but those are just details.
Of course I agree with this, but without technological progress this "saturates" rapidly. Only long-term durable productivity growth per unit of labor comes from technology - i.e. better ways of doing stuff.
A somewhat unfair characterization of the historical norm. Before the Italian Renaissance, history was marked by periods of growth interleaved with periods of decline, in many cases because a societal crisis caused a destructive regime to take hold. For example, the Mongol conquests installed an extractive regime that was soon replaced by the ultraconservative Ming dynasty, which resulted in China's progress stalling for some four centuries.
From an economist's perspective, energy is not typically recognised as a critical quantity. In so far as it is considered, it's thought of as an incidental property of some good or service being traded like oil or electricity.
But technological progress can be understood as successively more sophisticated ways of capturing and directing energy from natural processes. Economic growth has always occurred downstream of technologies that extract more energy or increase efficiency. Sheep, horses, windmills, coal, oil, nuclear ... etc.
Metrics like kWh per capita might become more interesting as the understanding of energy/growth matures. Or externally added energy (by electricity, oil, and fertiliser) per calorie of food.
To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. Electrification of transport (bc low thermodynamic efficiency of combustion engines) is an example of how we are doing this.
So even if technology continues to develop, unless efficiency grows faster than energy sources wane, there will only be economic degrowth.
There’s also almost the entire economics-related work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. From his Wikipedia page:
> He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was decisive for the establishing of ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
> To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology.
And that's something which happens thousands of times per day all over the world in different businesses and in almost all human endeavour. We're constantly getting more and more utility out of the material and energy we use. So growth is both using more resources, as well as using them in better ways.
For reducing energy use, social values matter at least as much as technology. Imagine if we had no better technology - but most people drove small cars instead of large SUV's and trucks, and jet plane trips were not routine for hundreds of millions of people.
Feel free to live in a modest-sized, well-insulated version of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakers with a live-in domestic staff serving your meals on solid gold plates.
Or is your definition of luxury "performative wasting of energy"? If so, the lower the tech that you have access to, the better for the rest of humanity. :(
This is a persistent mythology of western economic history to "cleanwash" the past and "explain" the present inequality (or what was the present until recently)
Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats.
Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues.
The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today.
Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
The west didn't get rich from colonizing the world.
It got rich domestically through industrialism. Then the newly rich countries went on to colonize the world, because now they could. If and how much the colonies made them even richer is debatable, but it was probably a net cost on average.
This is one of several insights counter to "common sense" that economists have figured out.
> If and how much the colonies made them even richer is debatable, but it was probably a net cost on average. This is one of several insights counter to "common sense" that economists have figured out.
I haven't heard this before, do you have sources where I could learn more?
Let me just add that the colonizing of the Americas in the 1500s was of course unrelated to industrialism emerging centuries later. Much of that was an accident of immunology.
Note that industrialized countries without colonial empires ended up at least as rich as the big European colonial powers.
May be progress is as simple as making energy very cheap, ensuring a diverse manufacturing capability with most efficient methods while making sure 1 or 2 inputs do not bottleneck you.
Larger and bigger powers can control different parts of 'supply chain' (for lack of a better word) and make it difficult to progress without them getting a royalty. In their minds they are justified as they made progress first and others are simply copying their IP
> Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
This is just silly. Everywhere had forced labour, but didn't manage to build what the west did. The African slavers selling their fellow continent-dwellers didn't somehow manage to pick all the people who could build the most advanced things in the world at the time.
Oxford University was founded in 1096, long before what you're describing. This is very strong evidence that the UK has a thousand years of excellent investment in education, which much better explains all the advantages that built its empire, the good bits and bad. Its advances are in part due to the Roman colonisation, which allowed Britain to rediscover things that much more advanced civilisation had discovered 1000 years prior to that founding, and then push on to far greater heights.
There are entire countries that still wouldn't have universities today if left to their own devices. But they would still have slaves, because western powers wouldn't have ended this practice, either through Christianity or, if that didn't work, by force.
Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions, much before Oxfordians did anything of note. Just look at the history of Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic mathematics for a simple example, or Indian linguistic inquiry for another.
The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
> Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions
I didn't say they didn't. The ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids, too. But that doesn't mean Egypt sustained that advantage and developed leading-edge science, values, and technology to the present day. They had a brief moment, and they are today in some ways a very cool country, but, as with most countries, they measure progress as "how far along the tech and culture trees we are compared to the West".
> The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
Maybe you should read my comment again tomorrow, with a clearer head.
> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life for people around the globe.
> However, this was not always the case. Quite the opposite – stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history. Despite important discoveries now and again, which sometimes led to improved living conditions and higher incomes, growth always eventually levelled off.
> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth
since the end of the 19th century...
Am I missing something?
How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history?
Sure, the economic growth of the last 150 years is unprecedented in history. But so was the second most significant period of economic growth before it stagnated.
We know this to be false given the number of civilisations that depleted their soil due because they didn’t know (or care) about crop rotation. Stable-state economies which nevertheless collapsed because they missed a key technology.
> Innovation is such that efficiency increase requires fewer resources and land.
...to produce the same output. Growth requires greater output though.
Just look at the timeline of energy consumption [0]. Either you're wrong and innovation requires more resources, or you're right and there's no direct relation between innovation and overall resource usage.
The metric you’re looking for is energy intensity of GDP [1]. How much energy does each unit of GDP cost. It’s been going down, and it’s lower in rich countries than less developed ones. (Its material counterpart is material intensity of GDP.)
I'm not sure that's what I was looking for though. That's unit consumption per GDP, so it may look stable or even declining regardless of actual consumption of resources.
In a way, it indicates the potential for a more sustainable living but unless it goes down by greater amounts than GDP growth, it's still net positive environmental damage.
> unless it goes down by greater amounts than GDP growth, it's still net positive environmental damage
Sure. Link in population and living standards and you start to get a toy model that dispels the notion that all growth must be about consumption. (A palette of iPhones represents growth from mainframes of equal mass and energy consumption.)
The world/universe doesnt last forever either. That does not say much. Unless you have reason to believe technilogical innovation will end in a foreseeable future, growth will not be expected to end in that timeline
Why not just Economics. Why do they have to play games with everyone by adding "science" to everything? Economic "Sciences" is just as absurd as Creation "Science".
Apparently, when the Riksbank decided it wanted to publicly fund a prize for the category, the verbosity of the name of the prize was a concession to distance it from the other simply-named Nobel Prizes, funded by the family.
> What was the position of the Nobel family? Three days before the meeting of April 26, the then director of the Nobel Foundation, Nils Ståhle, met two members of the family and telephonically talked with a third one. Their position was that “it should not become like a sixth Nobel Prize”, but that if the economics prize could be kept clearly separate from the Nobel Prizes then it might be an acceptable idea.
> They obtained her written approval of the economics prize “under given conditions,” namely that the new prize in all official documents and statements should be kept separated from the Nobel prize, and called the “prize in economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel.” In a telephonic conversation with a nephew, Martha Nobel said that the whole thing was prearranged and impossible to oppose, so that one could only hope that they would keep their pledge that no confusion with the real Noble prize should occur.
> What has happened is an unparalleled example of successful trademark infringement. However, nobody in the world can prevent journalists, economists and the general public from talking about the “Nobel prize in economics,” with all its connotations.
Economics is the study of scarcity. Scarcity comes in many forms: land, attention, materials, time. (It is not the study of money, which is a common belief of those who have not thought about what money is. Money is merely a fungible token claim on resources, not the resource itself.)
You could also believe that the study of physics is just the study of business, because businessmen operate in a world governed by physics.
Is this a real question? Businessmen are in the business of management. It's why businessmen tend to get MBAs. Whilest economists get degrees in economics.
I was thinking about this concept of creative destruction recently.
I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa.
Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from
it, but not a whole lot. Is it net good or bad (for the area) for somewhere like that to close? Was this lifestyle business depriving the area of better services, more tax revenue? Or does the area now get less services and the money is mostly extracted into the coffers of a non-local property development enterprise. Quite hard to judge. Maybe there’s some good heuristics for estimating such things?
this isn't necessarily true. While it generates less direct revenue, it increases nearby land value in two ways: 1) business activity which would have taken place on that parcel "overflows" to nearby parcels, ie, the demand for those other land uses doesn't go away and increases prices in the surrounding area. 2) the park provides real value to its users and access to that value also increases nearby ground rents.
In the year 2025 the zeitgeist is decidedly against any considerations beside crude profit. Like someone pointed out: a park generates less revenue than a café. And a neighbourhood café probably less than a hyperoptimised gigachain. But is an urban park not an important part of quality of life? And is not a neighbourhood café with its crowd of regulars and familiar faces and accessible prices a better thing that yet another chain store #28174? [1]
No space in 2025 for any such considerations.
[1] Case in point: I just read a news piece announcing that an 85 year old café in downtown Lisbon will be closed down to make way to yet another generic gentrified """brunch place""" for tourists. The regulars, many of them elderly and for whom the friendly place was basically a living room to help stave off lonelyness; many of them working people used to stopping by for fresh bread and a chat on their way home from work, are dismayed of course. But it's more "economically efficient" to cater to tourist jerkoffs and sell them the same overpriced egg on croissant that they can have in any large city in the world...
Just in case you missed it, last year's winners included it as one phenomena in their 2019 book, The Narrow Corridor, it's kind of like an interpretation of history through their particular lens.
I find macroeconomics fascinating. These theories to explain how growth works, what incentivizes it, where value comes from, I find them really fascinating.
It kind of echoes a common theme with LLMs, of humans creating systems that somehow work and only afterwards trying to make sense of why they work. We know that transformers are good at capturing context, and gradient descent is good at arriving at a working model of that context but how exactly this knowledge is being distilled and stored in an embedding space, no exact clue.
Is there some course which teaches the basics of macroeconomics?
1/4. The max number of recipients of any prize is 3, but it can be split into a half, and then one of those halves into two further halves, for a 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/4 split. (It can also be split equally into 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3).
Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bias, it enforces status at the cost of the collective or institutional. The US is a sad case for economic "modeling."
Of course, both scientific approaches of history and myth are the work of fabulists. eg Jung, Campbell. The point is to examine the myth and then history as the source of causal illusions.
“The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool … to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donald
That's folk science, what Donald is describing (he admit this in Origins of the Modern Mind).
Remember that the causal framework must be evaded to reach scientific correlations, where multiple contradictions can lead to knowledge. Myth and history were addictive hiccups that trapped humans in way simplistic explanations.
We evade this "plain English" silliness, like economics, or go bust.
A jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows - definitely for large periods of time, with occasional exceptions. The fact that individuals grow in this jungle doesn't mean that the jungle itself grows. By whatever metric you look at it (mass, CO2 consumption, O2 emission, etc) the jungle doesn't grow, at least not for the majority of its lifetime (obviously, at some point it grew from an original small size to its current size, and it will occasionally experience waxing and waning as the climate and other geographical features change).
By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed by the totality of individuals.
> jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows
Jungles today are fantastically more complicated than they were a billion years ago.
Earth’s biosphere’s energy flux is higher today than it was hundreds of billions of years ago [1]. This is due to various metabolic “innovations.” It also occurred because life directly altered Earth’s atmosphere and at least surface geology that made it more conducive to more life [2].
> By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed
This is not how this fucking paper defines growth. Nor is gross consumption how most models define growth—the word production is right there in GDP.
It's an extinction project, growth or sustained growth, you're describing mathematical politics, which is arbitrary. All animals reach a homeostasis/allostasis with the environment. Humans don't require synthetic categories ie "goods and services" we require functional relationships to resources that become streamlined into ecological categories in order to survive.
"Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticized and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of both the locations and total area of opportunity"
Wikipedia says "Globally, planted forests increased from 4.1% to 7.0% of the total forest area between 1990 and 2015." And the Green Wall in China is arguably doing cool things.
Reforestation might not solve our issues, but I don't see "nonsense."
You keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel any better.
In real life, it may mean that people feel that, though you state your points as though they are obviously true, you have given no reason for us to actually agree with your dogmatic assertions. That doesn't prove that economics is a primate bias; it proves that you are not doing well at persuading people.
There is no such thing as economic science. If you can find an empirical, demonstration of mental events, biology, correlating value through arbitrary means, I'm all ears. Until I see proof, this is witch doctor level thinking hoisted onto the West as a self-immolation project.
The US has among the richest citizens in the world, with a high quality of life. You could do worse for modeling, like perhaps your socialist darlings.
Growth is not necessary but provides benefits. A country that grows improves its quality of life. Extreme poverty levels have been plumetting for decades because of said growth ( mostly represented in China and India). The poorest countries trade the least.
Economics today is mostly about data. For instance tariffs lead to worse outcomes for consumers; only populists like them. Or, compare housing affordability between areas with lax zoning or strict zoning. Just because data isn't gleaned from a physics experiment doesn't mean it isn't useful; more than likely you probably invoked social science research data to support a POV that wasn't a controlled experiment; was that all in fact nil in value? The facts don't matter, or rather, there are no facts and only ideology exists? That must be why communists twist themselves over "is" and "ought"
As a post-symbolic, post-causal thinker (not a "socialist" which is also political nonsense), economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping ("richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).
Until we move to measurement (ie analog) rather than binary statistics (which is still merely a project based in counting, yes, 1,2,3) then we are totally informationally emasculated.
Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.
My ideology is the replacement of symbols with measurement. I have no relationship with politics, which is clearly a dinosaur still walking the Earth. Politics will vanish in the post-symbolic like a disease we cured easily.
No economics is like any word, it's arbitrary, that is HOW it needs a definition that varies from state to state.
"Economic theory has never gotten any better at prediction. Its explanations are always after the fact. The mathematical models economists have devoted themselves to for more than a century can’t be improved to enhance their empirical relevance." Alex Rosenberg
The deadness of the West is so unusual, as if the whole enterprise was for self-extinction of a way of poetically enhancing words, narratives and myths/religion. The West was simply a temporary state.
The west assumed individual happiness (politics, entertainment, biographical myth making, celebrity) was the path to collective happiness. But of course, in our agentic languages, that was simply the hydra of our undoing.
The west was like a temporary infection that colonized and dominated more collective people, but now we will be subsumed if we don’t destroy the world in a suicidal urge to dominate
"Unlike the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Literature and Peace, which were created by Nobel in his 1896 will and first awarded in 1901, the Economics Prize was conceived by Sweden's central bank in 1968 to mark its tricentenary and first awarded a year later."
Sure, it's paid by the Swedish central bank instead of the Nobel foundation, and it wasn't established by Alfred Nobel himself. Nobody cares. Value of such awards depends entirely on peer recognition, not on who pays or what exact labels they carry. Selection for economics is done by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, like the other science awards.
Yeah, "this isn't even a real prize, it wasn't selected at a time when it wasn't considered a distinct academic field by a benefactor concerned primarily about what his obituary might say" is even more tedious than pointing out that the Turing Award wasn't actually conceived by Alan. Much better arguments about issues with things individual Economic Nobel winners argued for than that...
Well, the thing is Economics is a very unique discipline. It's not quite a science but also not merely philosophy. Its object of study is affected by the study itself. It's very strange. That's why mutually exclusive economic theories have won the Nobel prize!
The issue with this prize isn't that economics is not a real science. Nobel prizes are primarily vulgarization and communication tools, and as such are inhenrently political. The Sveriges Riksbank is piggy-backing off the popularity of Nobel Prizes to advocate for a certain vision (their vision) of economic orthodoxy. It is overwhelmingly awarded to white western men, who, more relevantly, all share an anglocentric neoliberalist vision of economics. This, I hope, we are allowed to take issue with.
EDIT: apparently not. I would rather you explain to me why than downvote mindlessly.
White western men are no more represented in Economics than other hard sciences, and concensus in Economics is no different in East Asia and the rest of the world excepting the authoritarian Socialist experiments.
It's a field which is mostly interested in models and anyone can agree that a model is consistant and implies surprising things even if they think the hypotheses it makes don't faithfully represent reality.
It's endlessly fascinating to me how some people will happily disparage economics while having very little idea of what it's actually about.
Modelling isn't the higher intellectual pursuit it's made out to be. Imo designing theoretical models post-hoc to "support" a desired conclusion is not unheard of in econ/finance.
I don't see what point you're trying to make. Do you mean to claim that the Sveriges Riksbank is unbiased in who it chooses to give their price to? Unless you believe that 90% of economists come from the US (and the remaining 10% from the UK), you should take issue with this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_l...
> concensus in Economics
That's what I was talking about. This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank. To the point that there are people like you who feel they should defend them against the evil "authoritarian Socialist", because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism. I sincerly hope you consider broadening your horizons, maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
> I don't see what point you're trying to make. Do you mean to claim that the Sveriges Riksbank is unbiased in who it chooses to give their price to?
I made no such claim. I don't take issue with that list: the US by far leads in number of high‐profile economic researchers, high publication output, large number of employed economists.
Just as Mathematics is still Mathematics in the rest of the world, the broad perspective on Economics is not meaningfully different in the rest of the world. Even if it originated in the anglo-sphere, it's global. That's the point I made.
> This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank.
Leading Economists globally find consensus on all manner of policy issues. Many academic papers model the effects of tariffs on prices, welfare, and the consensus is that tariffs generally harm consumers. Surveys conducted on Economists show strong consensus there.
> because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism
It's not a long list. Even Social Democracy darlings of Europe are effectively just Liberal with a bit more spending. Incidentally, France is in deep trouble because of this. Their public spending as a % of GDP far exceeds peers.
Piketty is decidedly heterodox, and I've read Capital in the 21st Century, though not his latest which as I understand revisits much of the same. Wealth taxes have been tried in several countries including Austria, and promptly dropped. That's because they do not work well. It's difficult to implement and the returns just aren't good.
It's a, "They hate him because they told the truth," situation. Frankly, it applies to the Peace Prize as well, but this one has an even more naked agenda. It would be a disservice not to mention its history every time it's brought up, because it is ever-salient to any discussion of the merit of the winners.
Well you are on an anglo-centric neoliberalist imperialist site filled with people that are economic beneficiaries of that. Basic economic game theory that you'd be downvoted.
Extreme poverty rates have been plummeting precisely because East Asian countries became economic beneficiaries. The rest of the world operates on the same principles.
Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables.
When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ...
Not always/limited in some areas (astrophysics come to mind where we, e.g., cannot (yet) create a star under controlled conditions). Testing hypotheses or predictions vs observations is also a valid method.
Science is not about where you test hypotheses, but how. Astrophysics builds falsifiable models and checks them against reality like spectra, gravitational waves, etc... When predictions fail, theories change.
If these were economists, they would check if their equations match the economic universe they live in. :-) Instead, they conclude the agents just “did not behave rationally enough”.
That's just not true. The models have real predictive power, they just have limitations. Behavioral economics, which tackles this frontier is still a growing field. Thaler, Kahneman, and Taversky won the prize in 2017 for building the bridge between economic theory and individual decision-making.
At the risk of being inflammatory-- These arguments are the equivalent of saying that Newton didn't really do physics because his models of mechanics break down at high enough speeds and small enough scales.
> Physics can test those hypotheses under controlled conditions
I genuinely have no idea why so many commenters on HN will spout nonsense based on high school curriculum with the confidence of a PhD when it comes to economics, but won’t embarrass themselves in other fields.
Yes, economics—particularly microeconomics—is constantly subject to experimentation. Macroeconomics is closer to astronomy, in that models are developed, novel data sources sought, old models tested and then validated or rejected. Also like astronomy, or perhaps more accurately fundamental physics, it’s currently off in a loop of DSGE optimizations which are mathematically pretty for the field but not super interesting outside it. (This work is not in that category.)
That comparison collapses instantly. Physics has invariants...Economics does not. You can’t rerun the economy under controlled conditions, so “experiments” are mostly natural or quasi experiments...statistical patchwork with fragile assumptions.
Macroeconomics isn’t like astronomy :-) Stars don’t change behavior when you model them. Economies do. There are no stable primitives, no conservation laws, just shifting behavior and feedback loops.
DSGE models are equilibrium sandcastles calibrated to past data. In physics that’s failure while in macro it’s tenure.
Economics is interesting and sometimes useful but calling it an experimental science is self-flattery.
“One thing we are not going to have, now or ever, is a set of models that forecasts sudden falls in the value of financial assets.”
-- Robert E. Lucas
"As a policy-maker during the crisis, I found the available models of limited help. In fact, I would go further: in the face of the crisis, we felt abandoned by conventional tools."
-- Jean-Claude Trichet - https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2010/html/sp101118.en.html
"How Conventional Wisdom Failed Us" - https://youtu.be/c8LMWCko4d0?t=138
Argentina managed to save itself from hyperinflation by drastically cutting spending. By your logic, this could not be in the least bit predictable and inflation as a phenomenon doesn't even matter.
Supposing it did was fairly predictable that not setting money on fire would help recovery, what does it matter that there is no controlled scientific experiment involved? Or to put it another way, are there no facts to be gleaned from data?
Argentina didn't manage shit, else they wouldn't have to be bailed out by the Trump admin. This should come as a surprise to no one, "General AnCap" may have artifically and temporarily given the impression of good numbers by destroying his country's public infrastructure, but this is at the direct cost of the future. Now they're starting to pay the price.
You're deflecting. Curtailing inflation was an outcome of policy. The U.S. had fuck-all to do with it. Unless you're willing to acknowledge something so basic there's nothing else to say to someone disinterested in good faith discussion
Ehh... you're both wrong.
Argentina ended 2024 with an annual inflation rate close to 100%. That's significantly lower, but still hyperinflation. It should be lower this year, but how much is the question.
Whether that's maintainable long term is probably the decisive judgement. Argentina has had many cycles of hyperinflation, reset, hyperinflation again. The current bailout is not exactly a positive indicator.
It is not falsifiable because it is not a hypothesis but a framework for recognizing science.
Rejecting Popper for that is like rejecting reasoning itself because you can’t run a control experiment on it...but then one turns into an economist...
Economics _is_ a social science, and a politicized one at that. Sociology is more rigid than economics when it comes to validation of theories and choice of methods (statistics vs. mathematical models filled with assumptions). Economics, especially neoclassical economics, has a serious problem in prediction quality, a physics theory would have been abandoned by now if it was so bad at predicting real-life phenomena as the neoclassical school of economics is.
If sociology is so much more rigorous, why aren't sociologists invading the economic field? Surely they can use their rigorous statistics to produce papers on economic matters and put the entire field to shame?
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
Are you saying linear regression = statistics? Linear regression is something you learn in your first class, it's hardly ever the main model used.
And if you're going to claim that economists are publishing influential papers in other fields - and especially if you're claiming that they're doing so in an unprecedented way, with no inter-disciplinary collaboration - please provide some examples. And if you're thinking of Freakonomics, know that no researcher takes Freakonomics seriously, and neither should you.
As for sociologists "invading" economics, they sort of are. Economics and sociology have quite a bit of overlap, and researchers from the two fields often collaborate. And any group researching economic phenomena, even an inter-disciplinary one involving sociologists, would be identified as economists, not sociologists, by people reading their work. Although David Graeber, an anthropologist, did write an excellent book on economic phenomena in "Debt: the first 5000 years", and it has done quite well. You could say that it's "influential".
Unfortunately, neoclassical economics also has wide political support among the people it benefits: wealthy people and institutions, e.g. banks. Which also means they get bankrolled (hah) much more than other social scientists, which means they get preferential treatment. E.g., this very "Nobel prize" in economy that this theead is about is funded by a bank.
The force to change economics qould have to come from within economics, perhaps from behavioural economics, or new Keynesian economics (the first one seems more promising), or even from movements like degrowth or circular economics. You can't expect a sociologist to fix a different field, and that wasn't the point. The point was simply that sociology doesn't suffer this embarassment because they are not burdened by ideological pressure backed by monies interest.
It's a school of economics that became dominant in the 60s, it emphasises free market dynamics, much like the classical school, and especially focuses on consumption and optimizing economic actors, these actors are a very simple (and unrealistic) model of consumers. They also neglect production as an aspect of the economy.
Fun fact: The neoclassical economic school managed to remove the word "political" from "political economy" at the turn of the 20th century.
Not really, they're claiming a positive, I'm claiming a negative. The burden of proof is on them. The failure of neoclassical economics has also been widely discussed, especially following 2008, so it's a claim about the status quo.
>This critique sets the stage for a more political debate.
oh spare me. Social sciences are inherently political. They've always been political and they will always be political. Denying merely makes it worse. that's how you end up with the racialist anthropology of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Don't hang a picture of a dog turd on your front door and cry about all the people pointing it out.
Economist here…
An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.
What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.
Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.
As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.
No one in the economics profession cares.
Another contradiction by a member of the economics profession. It seems to me they care very much. By linking the prize to Alfred Nobel’s name (and to the Nobel institutions), the Riksbank ensured the prize would immediately carry great symbolic prestige. The Nobel brand was already well established internationally, so adopting the name helped the economics prize gain recognition, gravitas, and legitimacy.
I stand by my statement.
I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.
Really we don’t care.
I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “care” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.
Since you stand by your statement so strongly, you should have it already, correct?
Really we don’t care.
My point was speak for yourself, the history does not suggest you are correct. Evidence economists do care[1][2][3]. Economics was still a relatively newer niche discipline[4].
[1] https://developingeconomics.org/2024/10/22/the-nobel-illusio...
[2] https://ideas.repec.org/b/pup/pbooks/10841.html
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/nobel-priz...
[4] https://cooperative-individualism.org/parrish-john_rise-of-e...
You care so little you spent time to claim you don't care twice in a row.
> I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.
I don't have an estimate for that, but we have an estimate on how much money the Sverige Riskbank bankers were ready to spend in that effort. Maybe it didn't pan out but some people definitely had a multimillion dollar interest in making that happen. As an economist you must wonder what their incentives could have been …
> You care so little you spent time to claim you don't care twice in a row.
I've seen this style of argument before and I think it's a non sequitur and total BS. The fact that he may care about feeling his opinion is being misrepresented is totally different from what his original "we don't care" statement referred to.
Are you sure though? I don’t have an opinion on this specific case, but I have been in situations where someone claims to have no interest at all in a topic and then doesn’t stop talking about it.
Imo the economics profession very much suffers from inferiority complex known as "physics envy".
> economics profession very much suffers from inferiority complex known as "physics envy"
You’re mixing up quantitative finance and economics.
Excuse me? Quant finance doesn't claim to be devising grand theories about how the world operates (is more akin to engineering). And when it does, any delineation from economics is moot.
> Quant finance doesn't claim to be devising grand theories about how the world operates
What do you base this on?
What's quintessential quant finance? Black-Scholes and no-arbitrage pricing. Don't you agree it's much more of a tool than a theory of how the world works.
> What's quintessential quant finance? Black-Scholes and no-arbitrage pricing
This is a bad model to pick to exemplify physics envy given it’s based on thermodynamic dispersion.
The term “physics envy” broadly applies to all social sciences lacking a mathematical basis. It’s a criticism of using math where it doesn’t belong. That hasn’t really fit (until very recently) with economics. It’s been a classic complaint about quantitative finance’s loftier visions of universality.
I think OP meant that economists do consider the prize highly despite the distinction between its particular situation vs. the "core Nobels"
> It seems to me they care very much
I’d actually argue that the only people who love this piece of trivia are economists, financiers and a particular vein of Reddit.
What the other poster meant was that economists don’t care that it is not an original Nobel prize.
Source: also an economist
Maybe I will try Mokyr. I saw his "A Culture of Growth" is available as an audio book. What do you think about that book? Thanks
Agreed! I am a big fan of Robert Allen's books on the industrial revolution as a counterpoint to Mokyr. (The two are of course are friends with each other as well).
Are there any good papers floating out there?
Sure…
Mokyr’s northwestern website has links to a lot of his papers.
An extremely crude selection rule:
Anything published in the American economic review, quarterly journal of economics, journal of political economy has the profession’s “highest stamp of approval”. It’s really hard to publish anything there. (There are two journals im not listing in that “top” category but he has no papers there on his website.). On aghion or howitts websites, look for the above journals but also econometrica and the review of economic studies. Those are the “top five” in the field.
There are surely papers in good history and Econ history journals on mokyr’s website but I don’t know the journals!
Standards for any chapter in a “handbook of X economics” or “handbook of the economics of X” are high - those should be good surveys.
Similarly a paper in the “annual review of economics”
Also mokyr has a bunch of work on Amazon. “The lever of riches” is a classic. “A culture of growth” is well regarded.
Finally he has a forthcoming book called “two paths to prosperity” with two other distinguished guys - one Econ historian (greif) and one political economy guy (tabellini). It’s coming out in about three weeks. Good timing, Princeton U Press!
Aghion and howitt have a growth textbook at the advanced undergrad level called “the economics of growth.”
They have a much more advanced work called “endogenous growth theory” which is for specialists (or at least anyone with first year PhD macro)
Aghion has a book called “the power of creative destruction.”
if you run into anyone who is serious about the "fake Nobel" complaint, just ask them why they have such a high opinion of taking money from an arms dealer, and such a low opinion of taking money from a public institution in one of the Nordic welfare states.
I'm not familiar with the two others but Aghion really isn't a surprise given the track record the Nobel committee for the econ prize has of following hype rather than anything else.
(I've been very critical of Aghion's work for the past few years since I've been exposed to his work over that period, but it always appeared to me as a potential laureate given the resonance of his work)
That's a tiny article, but it does contain an interesting passage: "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" which is the core of the reason the prize was awarded. I find it interesting to see technological progress so tightly coupled to sustained growth and I wonder if the implication is that growth will stop when technological progress stagnates. Is there any proof to that effect?
There is two contributors to growth: increase in population, and productivity gains. If tech adoption slows down and population slows down, we go back to the historical norm of no economic growth.
Productivity gains don't only come from technological progress. Accumulation of capital, such as infrastructure, education, access to healthcare etc, also increase productivity.
Claiming "access to healthcare" is capital is a novel idea. It's a social infrastructure. It doesn't directly lead to production, any more than lunch breaks do.
Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
If you view the humans actually producing stuff as human capital, which many economists have done, then keeping that (human) capital in decent enough form by allowing it to have access to decent enough healthcare is a logical step forward.
We could then go a step or two forward and posit that a sick populace means a sick consumer class means reduced demand for goods that generate growth, but those are just details.
Of course I agree with this, but without technological progress this "saturates" rapidly. Only long-term durable productivity growth per unit of labor comes from technology - i.e. better ways of doing stuff.
All healthcare beyond the village witch doctor was technological progress at one time.
A somewhat unfair characterization of the historical norm. Before the Italian Renaissance, history was marked by periods of growth interleaved with periods of decline, in many cases because a societal crisis caused a destructive regime to take hold. For example, the Mongol conquests installed an extractive regime that was soon replaced by the ultraconservative Ming dynasty, which resulted in China's progress stalling for some four centuries.
From an economist's perspective, energy is not typically recognised as a critical quantity. In so far as it is considered, it's thought of as an incidental property of some good or service being traded like oil or electricity.
But technological progress can be understood as successively more sophisticated ways of capturing and directing energy from natural processes. Economic growth has always occurred downstream of technologies that extract more energy or increase efficiency. Sheep, horses, windmills, coal, oil, nuclear ... etc.
Metrics like kWh per capita might become more interesting as the understanding of energy/growth matures. Or externally added energy (by electricity, oil, and fertiliser) per calorie of food.
To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. Electrification of transport (bc low thermodynamic efficiency of combustion engines) is an example of how we are doing this.
So even if technology continues to develop, unless efficiency grows faster than energy sources wane, there will only be economic degrowth.
> From an economist's perspective, energy is not typically recognised as a critical quantity.
Energy is a critical quantity in multiple subfields of economy including environmental economy where it's a core issue.
There’s also almost the entire economics-related work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. From his Wikipedia page:
> He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was decisive for the establishing of ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
That's why I'm convinced Jean Baptiste Say is a much more insightful early economist than Riccardo.
> To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology.
And that's something which happens thousands of times per day all over the world in different businesses and in almost all human endeavour. We're constantly getting more and more utility out of the material and energy we use. So growth is both using more resources, as well as using them in better ways.
For reducing energy use, social values matter at least as much as technology. Imagine if we had no better technology - but most people drove small cars instead of large SUV's and trucks, and jet plane trips were not routine for hundreds of millions of people.
> and jet plane trips were not routine for hundreds of millions of people
So lower standards of living.
Feel free to live in a modest-sized, well-insulated version of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakers with a live-in domestic staff serving your meals on solid gold plates.
Or is your definition of luxury "performative wasting of energy"? If so, the lower the tech that you have access to, the better for the rest of humanity. :(
This is a persistent mythology of western economic history to "cleanwash" the past and "explain" the present inequality (or what was the present until recently)
Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats.
Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues.
The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today.
Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
The west didn't get rich from colonizing the world.
It got rich domestically through industrialism. Then the newly rich countries went on to colonize the world, because now they could. If and how much the colonies made them even richer is debatable, but it was probably a net cost on average.
This is one of several insights counter to "common sense" that economists have figured out.
> If and how much the colonies made them even richer is debatable, but it was probably a net cost on average. This is one of several insights counter to "common sense" that economists have figured out.
I haven't heard this before, do you have sources where I could learn more?
There are scientists that reach quite different conclusions from you.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/research
Let me just add that the colonizing of the Americas in the 1500s was of course unrelated to industrialism emerging centuries later. Much of that was an accident of immunology.
Note that industrialized countries without colonial empires ended up at least as rich as the big European colonial powers.
May be progress is as simple as making energy very cheap, ensuring a diverse manufacturing capability with most efficient methods while making sure 1 or 2 inputs do not bottleneck you.
Larger and bigger powers can control different parts of 'supply chain' (for lack of a better word) and make it difficult to progress without them getting a royalty. In their minds they are justified as they made progress first and others are simply copying their IP
This is in line with Pommeranz (a western economic historian) and most of the whole "Great divergence" litterature.
> Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
This is just silly. Everywhere had forced labour, but didn't manage to build what the west did. The African slavers selling their fellow continent-dwellers didn't somehow manage to pick all the people who could build the most advanced things in the world at the time.
Oxford University was founded in 1096, long before what you're describing. This is very strong evidence that the UK has a thousand years of excellent investment in education, which much better explains all the advantages that built its empire, the good bits and bad. Its advances are in part due to the Roman colonisation, which allowed Britain to rediscover things that much more advanced civilisation had discovered 1000 years prior to that founding, and then push on to far greater heights.
There are entire countries that still wouldn't have universities today if left to their own devices. But they would still have slaves, because western powers wouldn't have ended this practice, either through Christianity or, if that didn't work, by force.
What racist and xenophobic BS.
Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions, much before Oxfordians did anything of note. Just look at the history of Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic mathematics for a simple example, or Indian linguistic inquiry for another.
The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
> Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions
I didn't say they didn't. The ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids, too. But that doesn't mean Egypt sustained that advantage and developed leading-edge science, values, and technology to the present day. They had a brief moment, and they are today in some ways a very cool country, but, as with most countries, they measure progress as "how far along the tech and culture trees we are compared to the West".
> The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
Maybe you should read my comment again tomorrow, with a clearer head.
> What racist and xenophobic BS.
A much clearer head.
At first glance, "sustained growth" sounds like an oxymoron. Nothing can grow forever, unless the growth asymptotically approaches zero.
Nothing about "sustained" implies "forever". Sustained notes at the symphony don't continue after the audience leaves.
More usefully, constantly looking at "forever" while living at human life time scales and engineering and scientific progress time scales - is absurd.
This page: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre... explains in more detail what they mean. It's a pretty clean and effective explanation.
> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life for people around the globe.
> However, this was not always the case. Quite the opposite – stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history. Despite important discoveries now and again, which sometimes led to improved living conditions and higher incomes, growth always eventually levelled off.
...
> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth
since the end of the 19th century...
Am I missing something?
How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history?
Sure, the economic growth of the last 150 years is unprecedented in history. But so was the second most significant period of economic growth before it stagnated.
> How can they assert that the current trajectory of economic growth won't end in stagnation, like every other growth spurt throughout history?
Straw man. Nobody argues this.
There was more likely a series of 2K-4K golden ages diffused across areas globally 5-1K BCE where stagnation wasn't the rule.
We've probably yet to even come close to that eden-like experience.
Stagnation is environmentally sustainable. Constant creation-destruction cycles will ultimately deplete the environment
> Stagnation is environmentally sustainable
We know this to be false given the number of civilisations that depleted their soil due because they didn’t know (or care) about crop rotation. Stable-state economies which nevertheless collapsed because they missed a key technology.
Innovation is such that efficiency increase requires fewer resources and land. Population growth is stagnating and will peak in less than 100 years.
Neo-Malthusianism is as bunk as Malthusianism was
> Innovation is such that efficiency increase requires fewer resources and land.
...to produce the same output. Growth requires greater output though.
Just look at the timeline of energy consumption [0]. Either you're wrong and innovation requires more resources, or you're right and there's no direct relation between innovation and overall resource usage.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
The metric you’re looking for is energy intensity of GDP [1]. How much energy does each unit of GDP cost. It’s been going down, and it’s lower in rich countries than less developed ones. (Its material counterpart is material intensity of GDP.)
[1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...
Thanks, that's an interesting reference.
I'm not sure that's what I was looking for though. That's unit consumption per GDP, so it may look stable or even declining regardless of actual consumption of resources.
In a way, it indicates the potential for a more sustainable living but unless it goes down by greater amounts than GDP growth, it's still net positive environmental damage.
> unless it goes down by greater amounts than GDP growth, it's still net positive environmental damage
Sure. Link in population and living standards and you start to get a toy model that dispels the notion that all growth must be about consumption. (A palette of iPhones represents growth from mainframes of equal mass and energy consumption.)
The world/universe doesnt last forever either. That does not say much. Unless you have reason to believe technilogical innovation will end in a foreseeable future, growth will not be expected to end in that timeline
More detail on accomplishments in press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre...
Press conference: https://www.youtube.com/live/EajZObplJ8U
https://www.reuters.com/world/mokyr-aghion-howitt-win-2025-n... - includes quotes from press conference, including commentary from laureates on present geopolitical climate
Why not just Economics. Why do they have to play games with everyone by adding "science" to everything? Economic "Sciences" is just as absurd as Creation "Science".
There's actually a fair amount of drama around why this is!
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/the-nobel-family-disso...
Apparently, when the Riksbank decided it wanted to publicly fund a prize for the category, the verbosity of the name of the prize was a concession to distance it from the other simply-named Nobel Prizes, funded by the family.
> What was the position of the Nobel family? Three days before the meeting of April 26, the then director of the Nobel Foundation, Nils Ståhle, met two members of the family and telephonically talked with a third one. Their position was that “it should not become like a sixth Nobel Prize”, but that if the economics prize could be kept clearly separate from the Nobel Prizes then it might be an acceptable idea.
> They obtained her written approval of the economics prize “under given conditions,” namely that the new prize in all official documents and statements should be kept separated from the Nobel prize, and called the “prize in economic science in memory of Alfred Nobel.” In a telephonic conversation with a nephew, Martha Nobel said that the whole thing was prearranged and impossible to oppose, so that one could only hope that they would keep their pledge that no confusion with the real Noble prize should occur.
> What has happened is an unparalleled example of successful trademark infringement. However, nobody in the world can prevent journalists, economists and the general public from talking about the “Nobel prize in economics,” with all its connotations.
"Just economics" would go to the best businessman, no?
This is terribly confused.
Economics is the study of scarcity. Scarcity comes in many forms: land, attention, materials, time. (It is not the study of money, which is a common belief of those who have not thought about what money is. Money is merely a fungible token claim on resources, not the resource itself.)
You could also believe that the study of physics is just the study of business, because businessmen operate in a world governed by physics.
Is this a real question? Businessmen are in the business of management. It's why businessmen tend to get MBAs. Whilest economists get degrees in economics.
I was thinking about this concept of creative destruction recently.
I move to my neighbourhood in 2019. Before I got round to visiting them, a bunch of pubs and eateries closed down for the pandemic, and never re-opened. One pub became new apartments. A cafe became some sort of spa.
Take the pub for instance, I could imagine it was a lifestyle business for someone who made enough money from it, but not a whole lot. Is it net good or bad (for the area) for somewhere like that to close? Was this lifestyle business depriving the area of better services, more tax revenue? Or does the area now get less services and the money is mostly extracted into the coffers of a non-local property development enterprise. Quite hard to judge. Maybe there’s some good heuristics for estimating such things?
A park will generate less revenue than an apartment building, a sports complex, or a cafe.
Not all value is quantifiable in USD.
this isn't necessarily true. While it generates less direct revenue, it increases nearby land value in two ways: 1) business activity which would have taken place on that parcel "overflows" to nearby parcels, ie, the demand for those other land uses doesn't go away and increases prices in the surrounding area. 2) the park provides real value to its users and access to that value also increases nearby ground rents.
Tycho didn't claim it was. In fact, they explicitly asked if such a heuristic existed.
In the year 2025 the zeitgeist is decidedly against any considerations beside crude profit. Like someone pointed out: a park generates less revenue than a café. And a neighbourhood café probably less than a hyperoptimised gigachain. But is an urban park not an important part of quality of life? And is not a neighbourhood café with its crowd of regulars and familiar faces and accessible prices a better thing that yet another chain store #28174? [1]
No space in 2025 for any such considerations.
[1] Case in point: I just read a news piece announcing that an 85 year old café in downtown Lisbon will be closed down to make way to yet another generic gentrified """brunch place""" for tourists. The regulars, many of them elderly and for whom the friendly place was basically a living room to help stave off lonelyness; many of them working people used to stopping by for fresh bread and a chat on their way home from work, are dismayed of course. But it's more "economically efficient" to cater to tourist jerkoffs and sell them the same overpriced egg on croissant that they can have in any large city in the world...
Just in case you missed it, last year's winners included it as one phenomena in their 2019 book, The Narrow Corridor, it's kind of like an interpretation of history through their particular lens.
I find macroeconomics fascinating. These theories to explain how growth works, what incentivizes it, where value comes from, I find them really fascinating.
It kind of echoes a common theme with LLMs, of humans creating systems that somehow work and only afterwards trying to make sense of why they work. We know that transformers are good at capturing context, and gradient descent is good at arriving at a working model of that context but how exactly this knowledge is being distilled and stored in an embedding space, no exact clue.
Is there some course which teaches the basics of macroeconomics?
You can start with a used copy of an older edition of mankiw’s text which is a standard undergrad reference.
Barro also has an old undergrad macro text which is good
The gap between undergrad macro and professional macro is extremely large. That shouldn’t dissuade you it’s just a note.
Fantastic selection. As ever, it is worthwhile to be familiar with the winners' works, particularly this audience and this year.
This seems like a continuation on the theme of last year's award. Very nice!
What is the smallest fraction of a Nobel Prize that a winner can be awarded?
1/4. The max number of recipients of any prize is 3, but it can be split into a half, and then one of those halves into two further halves, for a 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/4 split. (It can also be split equally into 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3).
⅓
Sustained growth, like "economic science", is an oxymoron.
There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias.
Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/
Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bias, it enforces status at the cost of the collective or institutional. The US is a sad case for economic "modeling."
Aren't there quite a few historians, anthropologists and so on that study mythology?
Of course, both scientific approaches of history and myth are the work of fabulists. eg Jung, Campbell. The point is to examine the myth and then history as the source of causal illusions.
“The myth is the prototypal, fundamental, integrative mind tool … to integrate a variety of events in a temporal and causal framework.” Merlin Donald
That's folk science, what Donald is describing (he admit this in Origins of the Modern Mind).
Remember that the causal framework must be evaded to reach scientific correlations, where multiple contradictions can lead to knowledge. Myth and history were addictive hiccups that trapped humans in way simplistic explanations.
We evade this "plain English" silliness, like economics, or go bust.
A stable biome feels like sustained growth to me, via destruction and recycling. The jungle is always growing, even as plants die and rot.
Maybe the word should be "activity" vs growth.
A jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows - definitely for large periods of time, with occasional exceptions. The fact that individuals grow in this jungle doesn't mean that the jungle itself grows. By whatever metric you look at it (mass, CO2 consumption, O2 emission, etc) the jungle doesn't grow, at least not for the majority of its lifetime (obviously, at some point it grew from an original small size to its current size, and it will occasionally experience waxing and waning as the climate and other geographical features change).
By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed by the totality of individuals.
> jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows
Jungles today are fantastically more complicated than they were a billion years ago.
Earth’s biosphere’s energy flux is higher today than it was hundreds of billions of years ago [1]. This is due to various metabolic “innovations.” It also occurred because life directly altered Earth’s atmosphere and at least surface geology that made it more conducive to more life [2].
> By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed
This is not how this fucking paper defines growth. Nor is gross consumption how most models define growth—the word production is right there in GDP.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10288578/
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-020-00116-w
It's an extinction project, growth or sustained growth, you're describing mathematical politics, which is arbitrary. All animals reach a homeostasis/allostasis with the environment. Humans don't require synthetic categories ie "goods and services" we require functional relationships to resources that become streamlined into ecological categories in order to survive.
On a desertifying planet trapped in climate extinction, the jungle is only shrinking.
Look up reforestation work. It is a light in dark times.
We're inside the first animal created mass desertification project. Reforestation is nonsense.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SG8IGOzeF49Pbf8JZ-JWyzPq...
We lose 10 million sq miles of forests a year and have lost 1/3 of forest areas since 1000Ad, so "reforesting" isn't a viable reversal project.
And reforestation is poorly understood as "reforesting" is pursued on land already lost to forest capability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59799-8
"Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticized and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of both the locations and total area of opportunity"
Wikipedia says "Globally, planted forests increased from 4.1% to 7.0% of the total forest area between 1990 and 2015." And the Green Wall in China is arguably doing cool things.
Reforestation might not solve our issues, but I don't see "nonsense."
> Downvoting only proves the point
You keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel any better.
In real life, it may mean that people feel that, though you state your points as though they are obviously true, you have given no reason for us to actually agree with your dogmatic assertions. That doesn't prove that economics is a primate bias; it proves that you are not doing well at persuading people.
There is no such thing as economic science. If you can find an empirical, demonstration of mental events, biology, correlating value through arbitrary means, I'm all ears. Until I see proof, this is witch doctor level thinking hoisted onto the West as a self-immolation project.
The US has among the richest citizens in the world, with a high quality of life. You could do worse for modeling, like perhaps your socialist darlings.
Growth is not necessary but provides benefits. A country that grows improves its quality of life. Extreme poverty levels have been plumetting for decades because of said growth ( mostly represented in China and India). The poorest countries trade the least.
Economics today is mostly about data. For instance tariffs lead to worse outcomes for consumers; only populists like them. Or, compare housing affordability between areas with lax zoning or strict zoning. Just because data isn't gleaned from a physics experiment doesn't mean it isn't useful; more than likely you probably invoked social science research data to support a POV that wasn't a controlled experiment; was that all in fact nil in value? The facts don't matter, or rather, there are no facts and only ideology exists? That must be why communists twist themselves over "is" and "ought"
As a post-symbolic, post-causal thinker (not a "socialist" which is also political nonsense), economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping ("richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).
Until we move to measurement (ie analog) rather than binary statistics (which is still merely a project based in counting, yes, 1,2,3) then we are totally informationally emasculated.
> As a post-symbolic, post-causal thinker (not a "socialist" which is also political nonsense)
That tells me nothing about your perspective. Your ideology is as identifiable as anyone else's and you have to do politics like anyone else.
> economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping
It's not up to you. Economics has a definition.
> richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).
Wealth.
Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.
My ideology is the replacement of symbols with measurement. I have no relationship with politics, which is clearly a dinosaur still walking the Earth. Politics will vanish in the post-symbolic like a disease we cured easily.
No economics is like any word, it's arbitrary, that is HOW it needs a definition that varies from state to state.
"Economic theory has never gotten any better at prediction. Its explanations are always after the fact. The mathematical models economists have devoted themselves to for more than a century can’t be improved to enhance their empirical relevance." Alex Rosenberg
The deadness of the West is so unusual, as if the whole enterprise was for self-extinction of a way of poetically enhancing words, narratives and myths/religion. The West was simply a temporary state.
The west assumed individual happiness (politics, entertainment, biographical myth making, celebrity) was the path to collective happiness. But of course, in our agentic languages, that was simply the hydra of our undoing. The west was like a temporary infection that colonized and dominated more collective people, but now we will be subsumed if we don’t destroy the world in a suicidal urge to dominate
Obligatory post that, despite common parlance to the contrary, there is no “Nobel Prize in Economics.”
That said, this is still a super prestigious award.
And that's exactly why the title is "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". Not that it's a "Nobel Prize".
Such a post is definitely not obligatory.
"Unlike the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Literature and Peace, which were created by Nobel in his 1896 will and first awarded in 1901, the Economics Prize was conceived by Sweden's central bank in 1968 to mark its tricentenary and first awarded a year later."
https://web.archive.org/web/20071014012248/http://www.theloc...
And the story of how this came to be is absolutely wild. See
Mirowski, Philip. 2020. “The Neoliberal Ersatz Nobel Prize”. Pp. 219-254 in Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, edited by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski. Verso. Fulltext: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215796/1/Full-text-b...
HN discussions are predictable:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566804
Oh, there's much more, even: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'll add the obligatory Dilbert take: https://verisoeconomica.wordpress.com/2022/10/10/the-2022-no...
Sure, it's paid by the Swedish central bank instead of the Nobel foundation, and it wasn't established by Alfred Nobel himself. Nobody cares. Value of such awards depends entirely on peer recognition, not on who pays or what exact labels they carry. Selection for economics is done by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, like the other science awards.
Yeah, "this isn't even a real prize, it wasn't selected at a time when it wasn't considered a distinct academic field by a benefactor concerned primarily about what his obituary might say" is even more tedious than pointing out that the Turing Award wasn't actually conceived by Alan. Much better arguments about issues with things individual Economic Nobel winners argued for than that...
" it's paid by the Swedish central bank instead of the Nobel foundation"
And those who pay the piper call the tune.
Hence the brand of 'economics' that gets the gong.
Well, the thing is Economics is a very unique discipline. It's not quite a science but also not merely philosophy. Its object of study is affected by the study itself. It's very strange. That's why mutually exclusive economic theories have won the Nobel prize!
His descendants states that Nobel wouldn't have wanted a prize in his name. He didn't like economics because it is the science of greed.
"Nobody cares" gotcha. Greed never cares.
The issue with this prize isn't that economics is not a real science. Nobel prizes are primarily vulgarization and communication tools, and as such are inhenrently political. The Sveriges Riksbank is piggy-backing off the popularity of Nobel Prizes to advocate for a certain vision (their vision) of economic orthodoxy. It is overwhelmingly awarded to white western men, who, more relevantly, all share an anglocentric neoliberalist vision of economics. This, I hope, we are allowed to take issue with.
EDIT: apparently not. I would rather you explain to me why than downvote mindlessly.
White western men are no more represented in Economics than other hard sciences, and concensus in Economics is no different in East Asia and the rest of the world excepting the authoritarian Socialist experiments.
There's no "consensus" in economics, let alone.
Of course, there is consensus in economics.
It's a field which is mostly interested in models and anyone can agree that a model is consistant and implies surprising things even if they think the hypotheses it makes don't faithfully represent reality.
It's endlessly fascinating to me how some people will happily disparage economics while having very little idea of what it's actually about.
Modelling isn't the higher intellectual pursuit it's made out to be. Imo designing theoretical models post-hoc to "support" a desired conclusion is not unheard of in econ/finance.
That's nonsensical. There is overwhelming consensus over many things, e.g. tariffs.
I don't see what point you're trying to make. Do you mean to claim that the Sveriges Riksbank is unbiased in who it chooses to give their price to? Unless you believe that 90% of economists come from the US (and the remaining 10% from the UK), you should take issue with this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_l...
> concensus in Economics
That's what I was talking about. This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank. To the point that there are people like you who feel they should defend them against the evil "authoritarian Socialist", because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism. I sincerly hope you consider broadening your horizons, maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
> I don't see what point you're trying to make. Do you mean to claim that the Sveriges Riksbank is unbiased in who it chooses to give their price to?
I made no such claim. I don't take issue with that list: the US by far leads in number of high‐profile economic researchers, high publication output, large number of employed economists.
Just as Mathematics is still Mathematics in the rest of the world, the broad perspective on Economics is not meaningfully different in the rest of the world. Even if it originated in the anglo-sphere, it's global. That's the point I made.
> This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank.
Leading Economists globally find consensus on all manner of policy issues. Many academic papers model the effects of tariffs on prices, welfare, and the consensus is that tariffs generally harm consumers. Surveys conducted on Economists show strong consensus there.
> because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism
It's not a long list. Even Social Democracy darlings of Europe are effectively just Liberal with a bit more spending. Incidentally, France is in deep trouble because of this. Their public spending as a % of GDP far exceeds peers.
> maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
Piketty is decidedly heterodox, and I've read Capital in the 21st Century, though not his latest which as I understand revisits much of the same. Wealth taxes have been tried in several countries including Austria, and promptly dropped. That's because they do not work well. It's difficult to implement and the returns just aren't good.
It's a, "They hate him because they told the truth," situation. Frankly, it applies to the Peace Prize as well, but this one has an even more naked agenda. It would be a disservice not to mention its history every time it's brought up, because it is ever-salient to any discussion of the merit of the winners.
Well you are on an anglo-centric neoliberalist imperialist site filled with people that are economic beneficiaries of that. Basic economic game theory that you'd be downvoted.
Extreme poverty rates have been plummeting precisely because East Asian countries became economic beneficiaries. The rest of the world operates on the same principles.
Predictable...but are those aholes wrong...? :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013692
Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables.
When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ...
Unfalsifiable = Unscientific.
Neither are litterature and peace.
They are not pretending to be sciences.
These are all people using made up words to throw shit on other people.
> When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ...
When models fail, physicist adjust hypotheses ...
Physics can test those hypotheses under controlled conditions...
Ha. Controlled conditions.
Not always/limited in some areas (astrophysics come to mind where we, e.g., cannot (yet) create a star under controlled conditions). Testing hypotheses or predictions vs observations is also a valid method.
Science is not about where you test hypotheses, but how. Astrophysics builds falsifiable models and checks them against reality like spectra, gravitational waves, etc... When predictions fail, theories change.
If these were economists, they would check if their equations match the economic universe they live in. :-) Instead, they conclude the agents just “did not behave rationally enough”.
That's just not true. The models have real predictive power, they just have limitations. Behavioral economics, which tackles this frontier is still a growing field. Thaler, Kahneman, and Taversky won the prize in 2017 for building the bridge between economic theory and individual decision-making.
At the risk of being inflammatory-- These arguments are the equivalent of saying that Newton didn't really do physics because his models of mechanics break down at high enough speeds and small enough scales.
Not about controlled conditions then necessarily.
Not really my experience with economics - a lot of awareness of reality vs model (regardless of how "beautiful" they are).
> Physics can test those hypotheses under controlled conditions
I genuinely have no idea why so many commenters on HN will spout nonsense based on high school curriculum with the confidence of a PhD when it comes to economics, but won’t embarrass themselves in other fields.
Yes, economics—particularly microeconomics—is constantly subject to experimentation. Macroeconomics is closer to astronomy, in that models are developed, novel data sources sought, old models tested and then validated or rejected. Also like astronomy, or perhaps more accurately fundamental physics, it’s currently off in a loop of DSGE optimizations which are mathematically pretty for the field but not super interesting outside it. (This work is not in that category.)
That comparison collapses instantly. Physics has invariants...Economics does not. You can’t rerun the economy under controlled conditions, so “experiments” are mostly natural or quasi experiments...statistical patchwork with fragile assumptions.
Macroeconomics isn’t like astronomy :-) Stars don’t change behavior when you model them. Economies do. There are no stable primitives, no conservation laws, just shifting behavior and feedback loops.
DSGE models are equilibrium sandcastles calibrated to past data. In physics that’s failure while in macro it’s tenure.
Economics is interesting and sometimes useful but calling it an experimental science is self-flattery.
Argentina managed to save itself from hyperinflation by drastically cutting spending. By your logic, this could not be in the least bit predictable and inflation as a phenomenon doesn't even matter.
Supposing it did was fairly predictable that not setting money on fire would help recovery, what does it matter that there is no controlled scientific experiment involved? Or to put it another way, are there no facts to be gleaned from data?
Argentina didn't manage shit, else they wouldn't have to be bailed out by the Trump admin. This should come as a surprise to no one, "General AnCap" may have artifically and temporarily given the impression of good numbers by destroying his country's public infrastructure, but this is at the direct cost of the future. Now they're starting to pay the price.
> Argentina didn't manage shit
You're deflecting. Curtailing inflation was an outcome of policy. The U.S. had fuck-all to do with it. Unless you're willing to acknowledge something so basic there's nothing else to say to someone disinterested in good faith discussion
Ehh... you're both wrong. Argentina ended 2024 with an annual inflation rate close to 100%. That's significantly lower, but still hyperinflation. It should be lower this year, but how much is the question.
Whether that's maintainable long term is probably the decisive judgement. Argentina has had many cycles of hyperinflation, reset, hyperinflation again. The current bailout is not exactly a positive indicator.
Do you think Poppers demarcation criterion is falsifiable?
It is not falsifiable because it is not a hypothesis but a framework for recognizing science.
Rejecting Popper for that is like rejecting reasoning itself because you can’t run a control experiment on it...but then one turns into an economist...
Nice use of recursion...
I mentally place economic sciences sort of halvway between e.g. physics and social sciences on some imagined scientific rigidity scale.
They seem rigid enough to be useful, but I hope they can be done better. Perhaps using better simulation tools.
Economics _is_ a social science, and a politicized one at that. Sociology is more rigid than economics when it comes to validation of theories and choice of methods (statistics vs. mathematical models filled with assumptions). Economics, especially neoclassical economics, has a serious problem in prediction quality, a physics theory would have been abandoned by now if it was so bad at predicting real-life phenomena as the neoclassical school of economics is.
If sociology is so much more rigorous, why aren't sociologists invading the economic field? Surely they can use their rigorous statistics to produce papers on economic matters and put the entire field to shame?
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
Are you saying linear regression = statistics? Linear regression is something you learn in your first class, it's hardly ever the main model used.
And if you're going to claim that economists are publishing influential papers in other fields - and especially if you're claiming that they're doing so in an unprecedented way, with no inter-disciplinary collaboration - please provide some examples. And if you're thinking of Freakonomics, know that no researcher takes Freakonomics seriously, and neither should you.
As for sociologists "invading" economics, they sort of are. Economics and sociology have quite a bit of overlap, and researchers from the two fields often collaborate. And any group researching economic phenomena, even an inter-disciplinary one involving sociologists, would be identified as economists, not sociologists, by people reading their work. Although David Graeber, an anthropologist, did write an excellent book on economic phenomena in "Debt: the first 5000 years", and it has done quite well. You could say that it's "influential".
Unfortunately, neoclassical economics also has wide political support among the people it benefits: wealthy people and institutions, e.g. banks. Which also means they get bankrolled (hah) much more than other social scientists, which means they get preferential treatment. E.g., this very "Nobel prize" in economy that this theead is about is funded by a bank.
The force to change economics qould have to come from within economics, perhaps from behavioural economics, or new Keynesian economics (the first one seems more promising), or even from movements like degrowth or circular economics. You can't expect a sociologist to fix a different field, and that wasn't the point. The point was simply that sociology doesn't suffer this embarassment because they are not burdened by ideological pressure backed by monies interest.
Define neoclassical economics beyond its use in the blogossphere
It's a school of economics that became dominant in the 60s, it emphasises free market dynamics, much like the classical school, and especially focuses on consumption and optimizing economic actors, these actors are a very simple (and unrealistic) model of consumers. They also neglect production as an aspect of the economy.
Fun fact: The neoclassical economic school managed to remove the word "political" from "political economy" at the turn of the 20th century.
This is completely false. The opposite is true. Economics had drastically improved reproduction over decades.
Please provide some proof that neoclassical economics has done this.
I mean, I think the onus is on you to prove the opposite.
Not really, they're claiming a positive, I'm claiming a negative. The burden of proof is on them. The failure of neoclassical economics has also been widely discussed, especially following 2008, so it's a claim about the status quo.
But since you asked, here's an accessible overview: https://francescosyloslabini.info/2016/06/01/neoclassical-ec...
>This critique sets the stage for a more political debate.
oh spare me. Social sciences are inherently political. They've always been political and they will always be political. Denying merely makes it worse. that's how you end up with the racialist anthropology of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Don't hang a picture of a dog turd on your front door and cry about all the people pointing it out.
Sure, but if they keep awarding this non Nobel prize with a deliberately confusing name people will keep bringing it up.
The other solution would he some equivilent of a community note for it every year, it seems like things work as is though.